Various media outlets are trying to scare the bejesus out of us by reporting on a new study published in this month’s issue of Injury Prevention, a leading peer-reviewed journal focused on — you guessed it — research related to reducing injuries. “Deaths of Headphone-Wearing Pedestrians Increase, Study Finds,” was the title of Bloomberg’s article on the research paper. This is one of the more accurate headlines I’ve seen on the study, although even this one is likely being misinterpreted by many, as I’ll explain in a moment. An example of an inaccurate, sloppy, scaremongering title comes from the Toronto Sun, “Wearing headphones while walking can be deadly: Study.” Please. Wearing headphones while walking will almost certainly not kill you.
Many in the media have been conflating what the researchers found, that more pedestrians involved in vehicle collisions have been reported to have been wearing headphones, with “headphone-wearing increases pedestrian-vehicle crash risk.” While the authors note that there is most likely a link between increased risk of pedestrian-vehicle collision and the pedestrian wearing headphones, they specifically point out in their conclusion: “Also, since this is a retrospective case series, neither causation nor correlation can be established between headphone use and pedestrian risk” [emphasis added]. This is because the methodology used by researchers to determine the number of collisions in recent years relied heavily on searches of news databases, such as LexisNexis and Google News, which is not the most scientifically robust way to tabulate incidents given media biases.
It is also worth noting, as the researchers themselves note in their paper, that while these headphone-wearing-pedestrian collisions more than tripled over the six years studied, MP3 player ownership quadrupled over the same period. Simply because more pedestrian-vehicle collisions involving headphone-wearing pedestrians while ownership of headphone-dependent devices increased at a greater rate does not prove headphones necessarily increase pedestrian-vehicle collision risk by much. If a greater proportion of pedestrians are wearing headphones, you would expect that more vehicle-pedestrian collisions would involve pedestrians wearing headphones.
In a letter sent Tuesday to the Government Accountability Office, 11 House Democrats called on the watchdog agency to investigate California’s high-speed rail program. The rail system has faced increasingly harsh criticism as costs have ballooned, leading many to suspect misconduct on the part of California officials and the project’s supporters in the Obama administration.
The Democrats joined their Republican colleagues, who had sent the original request [PDF] to the GAO in December.
Also on Tuesday, the state-appointed California High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group recommended [PDF] that the Legislature refuse to issue $2.7 billion in bonds due to major funding concerns, management problems, and failure to disclose key details of demand forecasting models. Long-term federal funding no longer seems likely and the estimated construction costs have nearly tripled since 2008 to $98.5 billion. The panel concluded that moving forward without addressing these concerns would “represent[] an immense financial risk on the part of the State of California.”
October 2011 marked the eighth straight month [PDF] of declining year-over-year vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) in the U.S. Compared to October 2010, driving was down 2.3 percent. Since reaching its peak of 3.031 trillion VMT in 2007, driving has essentially plateaued. With gas prices continuing to hover as high as they have been in recent years, this is not surprising. Most of the decline is coming from rural areas, which makes sense given that the rural residents’ share of total population continues to fall [PDF], with most of the U.S. population growth taking place within metropolitan areas. Rural residents’ average auto trips tend to be longer, so they are likely forgoing a few trips — thanks to high gas prices and a weak overall economy — that end up showing significant declines in vehicle-miles traveled.
But part of the decline can be attributed to anti-automobile public policy. With the substantial increase in the U.S. urban population in recent decades, lane-miles have not kept up with population growth trends [PDF]. Rather than increasing physical lane space to benefit drivers, transportation planners at the local, state, and federal levels have been using their taxes to fund infrastructure and service that benefits a tiny fraction of the population, at the expense of drivers. About one-fifth of federal fuel tax revenue collected from highway users is siphoned off to expensive, underused, heavily subsidized mass transit systems. Traffic congestion now costs the economy more than $100 billion annually [PDF].
Congress is set to take up the multi-year surface transportation reauthorization bill this year (House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica has said by the end of January). Here’s to hoping they start fixing the problems they created, starting with: ending direct highway user subsidies of mass transit, permitting more tolling on federally funded highways, expanding private financing opportunities, and reining in the “flexing” of federal highway funding for non-highway purposes. But given their track record over the past 20 years, I’m not holding my breath.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) yesterday called on all states to ban “the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices (other than those designed to support the driving task) for all drivers.” This was in response to an August 2010 three-collision accident in Missouri involving two school buses traveling in a convoy, a pickup, and a truck-tractor. The accident killed two people and injured 38. It went like this:
Collision 1: The pickup driver, who was engaging in a text-message conversation, rear-ended the truck-tractor after failing to notice that it had slowed or stopped.
Collision 2: The first school bus, whose driver was distracted by a passenger bus pulled over on the side of the road, then struck the pickup, killing the pickup driver.
Collision 3: The second school bus, following the first bus too closely, was unable to stop in time to avoid the collision, killing a high school student seated in the rear of the first bus.
There were multiple factors involved: the pickup driver was distracted by his cell phone, the pickup driver was fatigued, the first school bus driver was distracted by the other passenger bus on the side of the road, and the second school bus driver failed to follow at a safe distance. However, it was the inattention and unsafe behavior of the school bus drivers that ultimately resulted in fatalities, and these collisions involved external, rather than internal factors. It is worth noting that at the time of the accident, Missouri had a law on the books that banned texting while driving for drivers under 21. The texting driver of the pickup was 19 years old.
The Occupy movement is planning to force a shutdown of West Coast ports, claiming they are standing in solidarity with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) over the group’s ongoing labor dispute at the Port of Longview, Washington. But as I previously noted, the ILWU has called on the Occupiers to stand down and to stop interfering in their affairs. Now a second major labor organization is condemning the Occupiers’ planned blockade, which is scheduled for this coming Monday:
Alameda County Building and Constructions Trades Council, which represents unions whose workers are employed by companies serving the Port of Oakland, joined the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in rejecting calls by protesters to have organized labor’s support in blocking work at the ports on Dec. 12.
The council’s move widens the division between labor groups and an Occupy movement that claims to speak for the principles and goals of union workers. The announced effort to shut down ports up and down the U.S. West Coast would be the most ambitious effort yet by a protest that began in New York as Occupy Wall Street.
“Unions affiliated with this council represent hundreds of workers who are working and have worked at the Port of Oakland. Not one of these unions has endorsed the call to shut down the port,” the San Francisco Bay-area trades council stated Friday.
While the Council notes that it supports many of the claimed goals of the Occupy movement, “the call to shut down operations at the Port of Oakland, where many of our unemployed workers and newly-indentured apprentices have recently been able to get back to work, makes no sense.” Jeff Smith, president of ILWU Local 8 in Portland, told the Portland Tribune that his members will not honor the Occupiers’ picket lines: “This is a third-party strike. We have to go to work.”
There has been some internal dissent within the ranks of the Occupy movement, but the realization that they will be actively fighting against the very people they claim to support does not yet appear to be widespread.
Over at National Review Online, I have an op-ed up explaining why fiscal conservatives should oppose House Republicans’ plan to direct oil and gas royalty revenue into the Highway Trust Fund:
A quick, temporary fix would be to raise federal fuel-tax rates, but this is a political non-starter in the current political and economic climate. If House Republicans are truly serious about improving our nation’s highway infrastructure without increasing federal tax rates on fuel, they could devolve more transportation funding responsibility to the states and support more tolling. They could also rein in the waste and abuse of highway-user revenues at the hands of pro-mass-transit special interests and their enabling politicians.
Instead, House Republicans appear ready to undermine one of the more fiscally conservative funding mechanisms in existence. A provision of the 1974 Budget Act requires that the Highway Trust Fund receive 90 percent of its revenue from users in order to maintain its exemptions from appropriations meddling. Assuming drilling royalty revenues are great enough to close the near-term funding gap, the House Republicans’ proposal would push the percentage of user-based Trust Fund revenue to well below 80 percent.
Weakening this standard calls into question the purpose of having a federal trust fund in the first place. If that were to happen, the chorus for abolition of user-pays and a reactionary reversion to general-revenue funding of highways would only grow louder. Rather than learning from our previous mistakes, we would be making them all over again.
In this installment of “Fred Weekly, CEI President Fred L. Smith, Jr., discusses the importance of applying technical concepts to commercial development and vice versa. Fred explains that the feedback loop between science and commerce has been one of the greatest forces for improving human life in all of history. Watch it below:
What’s the best way to reward individual innovation? In the latest episode of “Fred Weekly,” CEI President Fred L. Smith, Jr., says that entrepreneurial organizations are generally better than political institutions at rewarding those responsible for creating value. Watch below:
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), the agency tasked with writing and enforcing safety regulations for large trucks and buses, is due today to file a court report on the status of its proposed new hours-of-service rule — which dictates how many hours drivers may work, must spend in their sleeper berths, frequency of breaks, etc. CEI has criticized this rule on multiple occasions, including in formal comments submitted to the FMCSA earlier this year. We’ve pointed out that the rule, driven by lawsuits from the Teamsters union and the far-left special interest group Public Citizen, is both unnecessary (commercial motor vehicle accident rates have dramatically declined in recent years) and supported by fundamentally flawed analysis. One example of FMCSA’s shoddy analysis: the agency misrepresented the findings of peer-reviewed studies on sleep disorders and was subsequently criticized by the lead author of one of the studies [PDF].
The trucking industry is unsurprisingly strongly opposed to this proposed rule, which could cost the U.S. economy hundreds of millions of dollars (if not billions) annually if it is promulgated. The Obama administration is backing the rule, likely in an attempt to warm frigid relations with Big Labor and the Democratic party’s increasingly indifferent left-wing faction. On Wednesday, the Subcommittee on Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, Stimulus Oversight and Government Spending of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is holding a hearing on the misguided rulemaking, “The Price of Uncertainty: How Much Could DOT’s Proposed Billion Dollar Service Rule Cost Consumers This Holiday Season?“
We call on each West Coast occupation to organize a mass mobilization to shut down itslocal port. Our eyes are on the continued union-busting and attacks on organized labor, in particular the rupture of Longshoremen jurisdiction in Longview Washington by the EGT. Already, Occupy Los Angeles has passed a resolution to carry out a port action on the Port Of Los Angeles on December 12th, to shut down SSA terminals, which are owned by Goldman Sachs.
Occupy Oakland expands this call to the entire West Coast, and calls for continuing solidarity with the Longshoremen in Longview Washington in their ongoing struggle against the EGT. The EGT is an international grain exporter led by Bunge LTD, a company constituted of 1% bankers whose practices have ruined the lives of theworking class all over the world, from Argentina to the West Coast of the US. During the November 2nd General Strike, tens of thousands shutdown the Port Of Oakland as a warning shot to EGT to stop its attacks on Longview. Since the EGT has disregarded this message, and continues to attack the Longshoremen at Longview, we will now shut down ports along the entire West Coast.
Naturally, the self-righteous letter was signed “In Solidarity and Struggle, Occupy Oakland.” The labor dispute to which they refer has been covered by CEI’s Ivan Osorio on this site in the past. Essentially, the Longview, Washington, contingent of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union is upset that Longview grain terminal owner EGT wants to use a contractor that has a collective bargaining agreement with a different union, the International Union of Operating Engineers.
The dispute is essentially between two unions battling over who gets to represent about 35 workers at a new grain terminal (the Occupiers are mobilizing against international commerce over a fight among two member unions of the AFL-CIO and are choosing to support one union over another; meaning Occupy West Coast’s planned December 12 event is a union-busting action?). Several hundred of ILWU’s Longview club-wielding thugs members had previously responded by holding port security guards hostage, damaging rail cars, and dumping grain on the ground.
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